Today I learnt that I can 10x my use of Claude or AI to help with all manner of tasks that I consider boring automation and information conversion. For example, I asked Claude to interview me to capture stories of past experiences for preparing for interviews. I also asked it to just convert web pages for me into new formats so I could consume the information in more engaging ways.
There are a ton more things that could be automated and it would be a crime not to do so. They probably offer the best opportunity for learning too. Try and push the automation to as close as 100% and see what you can learn. It's not the most inspiring work but if done properly can free up time for other things. It's also simply a superpower to have first-hand insights into how these systems work when pushed.
Today I also managed to stretch Claude's context window in chat pretty far. Not clear what kind of context management is being run in chat but the results remained fairly consistent despite the long dialogue. Speed seemed to have slowed though.
Participated in an IDEO sponsored hackathon. We designed a solution that would capture a person's memories and experiences to be preserved once they've departed, and to embed those in physical objects e.g. a memorial bench, so members of the community can remember and learn from them.
We built a conversational experience with ElevenLabs and then talked about our hardware solution. We didn't win but I certainly learnt more about the large market for services related to death.
Opus eats a lot of tokens. It's not usable on the pro plan for any kind of serious work. Switched to Sonnet before going back onto Max. It's not clear however, how to evaluate the difference between Sonnet and Opus. I do not have my own dataset.
There was this thread from Thariq from Anthropic. Contained some good stuff on prompts and spec writing here. Prompt essentially what I've done before about asking Claude to interview you. This works if you know what you're at and it at least forces thinking about topics if they are new to you. However, I'm not sure it's the best way to learn something.
Would be great to have a skill to ask Claude to walk me through the code so I understand it better. This could be obsolete though if code review becomes abstracted away. We need new ways to understand the codebase such as diagrams or clean specs.